Inspiring Today’s Students to Become Tomorrow’s Innovators

A child goes to the orchestra for the first time and is awed by the xylophone player. When she goes home, she says to her parents, "I want to play that."

So what do they do? Do they buy her a full-sized multi-octave xylophone? No. Why would they give her expert equipment before giving her a stepping stone instrument to learn on? Instead, they buy a xylophone that's made for her. It's brightly colored, fits her size, can withstand her dropping it, playing on it, chewing on it -- whatever she wants to do with it, her xylophone can handle it. It looks radically different from the orchestra player's xylophone, but it's still a xylophone and the fundamental concepts and skills she learns on it apply as she graduates to bigger and more complex instruments.

Students of all ages need access to hardware that lets them experience early successes and scales to their abilities, eventually allowing them to learn on the same technology they will see after graduation.

Over time, she graduates to a more advanced instrument and learns even more complex skills, like playing with two mallets at once, and by the time she enters college, she has graduated to a full-size xylophone and pursues a music major. When she auditions for the New York Philharmonic orchestra, she knows and has practiced all the skills necessary to perform and has the experience to earn the role.

The same is true for riding a bike -- you don't get to the Olympics without starting on a tricycle, riding a bicycle with training wheels, and graduating to a road bike.

For science and engineering, the inspiration is there -- SpaceX is launching rockets to space, CERN is creating the world's largest particle accelerator, and projects such as North American Eagle are working to break the world land speed record.

But while students can see these engineering marvels, most never get exposed to how they work or have the opportunity to build one of their own. In fact, students rarely get to participate in activities where they actually do engineering.

Unfortunately, our society and education system bombards our students with lectures, rote memorization, theory, and math throughout their education. Even in college, most only get exposed to computer simulations and programming in Java or mathematics algorithms. This lack of hands-on experience for students is driving our future innovators away in droves. And for those who stay, they graduate with no real-world experience.

Employers expect the students of today to be prepared for the jobs of tomorrow -- even the ones that don't exist today. Is that a fair expectation if we've never given our students a chance to do engineering?

I believe to answer industry demands for job-ready graduates, we must create an educational continuum that parallels the progression of learning to play an instrument or riding a bike and create products that grow with students from kindergarten to rocket science.

In our society, failure is considered a bad thing. But we must remember that failure is essential to innovation and that success is more than getting a good grade on a test. We must teach problem-solving skills and critical thinking through hands-on, project-based learning.

In one of our recent stories, the author of this article (Ray Almgren), talked about the difficulty of teaching science and engineering to students. "Hard is fine," he said. "But we also want them to find their classes interesting." In FIRST and Lego Mindstorms, mentioned here, we see the embodiment of that spirit.

Good point, Chuck. The toy-like products in FIRST and Mindstorms are kid magnets. I wish we'd see that with computer aided engineering. Kids love their video games. When are they going to discover that much of computer aided engineering is beginning to resemble video games.

A few years back, Rob, there was a childrens' product -- I believe it was called "Sim City." It was fun for kids because they could create their own cities in a CAD environment. I don't know what happened to that product, but I'm willing to bet it drew some kids toward engineering and architecture.

Chuck, Sims is still around, bigger than ever. There's a ton of varieties, from fashion (very big) to roller coasters. For years it was the biggest software package for girls. My daughter spent tons of hours on Sims -- and scores of Dad's dollars. Nearly 200 million copies have been sold, making it the largest PC franchise in history.

My kids loved Roller Coaster Tycoon. It's a simulation game where you build rollercoasters on the computer. The velocity and accelerations of these coasters were pretty accurate and helped to initially expose them to basic laws of physics.

I totally agree that the education system for engineers is not that practicle as it should be .In our universities students are just bombarded with notes , lectures, numericles and so on instead they should be given practicle and hands on experience on different projects. They should be asked to make different projects because while making these projects students face alot of difficulties and by trial and error method they study alot .Our engineers gets graduated from universities with very good GPAs but unfortunately they exactly dont know what they will be required to do in there professional lifes .

It should be the responsibility of universities to send their students for appropriate internships and industry related programmes so that they are aware what is the requirement of industries for newly graduates. Seminars should be arranged by different Organisations for students for their career counclings.

Debra, I think it depends on the discipline when it comes to whether students get an understanding of what they will be expected to do when they graduate. The medical field is great at job training. And while engineering may be less so, I still think engineering schools prepare students for jobs better than most other disciplines do.

Rob, it totally depends upon the discipline and this is not happening in all universities as well i was just discussing this generally that no doubt engineering universities provide very good hands on on different devices but their practical exposure is not as much as required . They gain practical exposure when they enter into their professional lives.

"Creating an inspired classroom where lesson plans give students "aha" moments using techniques and tools the pros use to apply mathematical models to real-world data is critical to inspiring students. Educators need to provide students with interactive and fun lessons that are academically rigorous and deliver fundamental concepts that bring theory to life, and that's hard work."

It is hard work and with a lack of resources, the task becomes daunting. My son attended a charter school for junior high one semester. We found that the advertsing did not meet reality and his science teacher was not even supplied textbooks - she was actually using a book on oceanography that I had sent with my son one day as a "show and tell." When I offered to do a robotics club for her class, we actually held it during regular class time, to the delight of the teacher. My request to have copies made of some handouts I had created was met with trepidation - the school monitored how many copies the teacher would make and I wound up paying Office Depot to make copies so that I didn't use up all of my ink on my home printer. My husband and I purchased all of the stuff we needed and there was no budget available for the club. While the students were very eager and excited about the club, the lack of support from the school was discouraging.

On the other side of the spectrum, we visited a public junior high school where my son had entered a chess tournament and as we wandered the halls waiting for him to finish a match - we peered into a class room that had amazing contents - student built electronics projects where scattered throughout that included what looked like Arduino boards.

The need for both mentors AND resources is key and must have school support to truly be an effective program.

Industrial workplaces are governed by OSHA rules, but this isn’t to say that rules are always followed. While injuries happen on production floors for a variety of reasons, of the top 10 OSHA rules that are most often ignored in industrial settings, two directly involve machine design: lockout/tagout procedures (LO/TO) and machine guarding.

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